Despite all the moral hand-wringing,
international law forbids nations from attacking each other, outside of
Security Council approval or in self-defence, and alleged use of chemical
weapons is no exception. Western media and politicians are once again calling
for our governments to commit what Nuremberg Judges labelled the “supreme
international crime”. They risk further escalating the conflict despite a lack
of independent verification as to what actually happened in Douma, eastern
Ghouta.

Something must be done

We once again find ourselves surrounded
by a hypocritical, self-righteous and war-mongering echo chamber. Liberals and
Conservatives, with few exceptions, all appear to agree the question is not whether the UK and US shall be launching
military strikes against Syria, but rather when,
and with what level of payload.

The scene is all too familiar.
Unverified (though certainly possible) use of chemical weapons. Crying
children. Pictures and videos of people being hosed off in medical facilities. How
can anyone not be moved to “do something” rather than “stand by and do nothing”?

Unfortunately, the only
“something” being offered to the British, American and French public is the launching
of a military assault (of an unspecified nature) inside Syria - a sovereign
state - which has attacked neither Britain, America or France. Humanitarian
options like taking in refugees beyond the measly 11,000 or
so that
Britain has grudgingly accepted thus far, are not on the table. The only
response by an apparent use of violence by the Syrian government is even more
violence by the self-proclaimed leaders of the “free world”.

The situation has reached boiling
point with Russia officially stating that they will “[shoot] down” US missiles and “even the sources from whichthe
missiles were fired". The state of Israel has already launched strikes
within Syria, also without any legal justification whatsoever, apparently
killing 14 Iranians. Iran has vowed to retaliate against the attack. Now it appears May
won’t even seek permission from parliament before she drags the country further
into the war in Syria, having been pushed relentlessly by the British press and
political class to “act” now.

This already multi-layered
conflict risks snowballing even further, without any concrete evidence as to
what exactly happened, as former
Marine Corps intelligence officer and weapons inspector, Scott Ritter
outlines in his important piece for the American Conservative.

The supreme international crime

For the avoidance of any doubt or
confusion, attacking a foreign country without legal basis under international
law represents the “supreme international crime”. The launching of an
“aggressive war” is the “supreme crime” because it is the overarching offense
which contains within itself “the accumulated evil of the whole” (e.g. rape, torture, murder,
mass murder, ethnic cleansing, etc).

People were tried, convicted and hanged at Nuremberg for the crime of waging wars of aggression (as well as crimes
against humanity).

Regardless of how unpalatable we
may find it, even the verified use of chemical weapons -be they by state or
non-state actors - is not a legal basis to attack a country, any country.

As Phyllis
Bennis, Fellow and Director of the New Internationalism Project at the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., clearly explained (following the last alleged use of chemical
weapons by the Syrian government, and subsequent military strike on the Syrian
air base ordered by President Trump):

“The UN
Charter is very vague about a lot of things, but it's very clear about one
thing, and that is, when is it legal to go to war? When is it legal to use a
military strike? There's only two occasions according to the UN Charter…The UN
Charter says, "A country can use military force under two circumstances:
Number one, if the Security Council authorizes it."…Number two, Article
51 of the
UN Charter, which is about self-defence. But it's a very narrowly constrained
version of self-defence… It says very explicitly, "If a country has been
attacked."…"until the Security Council can meet, immediate
self-defence is allowed." Neither of those two categories applied here.
So, it was clearly an illegal act.”

We find ourselves once again in the exact same
situation.

We have been here before

In July 2017 award winning
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh discussed with The Real News Network his article published by the
German Die Welt, describing the claims that Trump ignored warnings by US intelligence
that there was “no evidence that” Assad used chemical weapons in Kan Sheikhoun
on 04 April 2017.

A subsequent UN report concluded (well after the strikes were conducted)
in September 2017 that there “reasonable grounds to believe” that the Syrian
government was responsible for a chemical attack on Kan Sheykhoun on 04 April
2017 along with two chlorine attacks on 25 and 30 March in Al-Latamneh this was
well after the strikes.

US Secretary of Defense James
Mattis would then, five months later, go on to tell reporters that the US still
“had no evidence” that the Syrian government used Sarin gas.

Irrespective of the UN findings,
or Mattis’ subsequent bombshell, as Phyllis Bennis pointed out, the strike was
illegal.

Yet, despite the illegality of
the 2017 US strikes, despite the death toll that followed (nine Syrian soldiers
and nine civilians including four children according to Syrian state
television), and despite the lack of conclusive proof at the time that there
even was a chemical attack, let alone verification as to what party or parties
were responsible, Donald Trump received strong bi-partisan support for the
strikes. The “liberal” press, including outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, along
with the Democratic Party establishment supported the attack.

“I am tempted to quote [singer
and songwriter] Leonard Cohen” said MSNBC News Anchor, who proceeded to then quote
Leonard Cohen: “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons”.

Influential commentator (and
protégé of the late Samuel Huntington) Fareed Zakaria told CNN, “I think Donald Trump became president of the
United States last night. I think this was actually a big moment.” Apparently
the killing of twenty five men, women and children in Yemen by US special
forces four months earlier wasn’t enough to establish Trump’s “presidential”
bona fides.

This one minute video by CNBC
of a list of “experts” on their view of the value of the Syria strikes is also
well worth watching, if only to belabour the unanimity of the views on this
missile strike.

The constant blasting of Trump as
being a “Putin puppet” puts immense pressure on the US President to prove
otherwise. Launching military strikes against the Russian backed Syrian
government delivers Trump bi-partisan establishment praise. It appears to be a
lesson he has learned well.

Media manipulation

All of this seems to be of little
concern to the British establishment and their compliant press. The former
British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Sky News that the UK will have to intervene in Syria or
give “cart blanche” for the further use of chemical weapons.

Conveniently left out by Sky News
is that Blair himself is guilty of deceiving parliament and the international community about
“weapons of mass destruction” possessed by Iraq, and pushed an illegal invasion
of the country that has killed hundreds of thousands, led to mass ethnic
cleansing, the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and ISIS, along with other
sectarian death squads.

All water under the bridge
apparently.

Another example of the press
cultivating a climate conducive to a British attack on Syria is ITV’s Good
Morning Breakfast show asking its followers on Twitter:

As the conservative commentator
Peter Hitchens once noted, opinion polls are more often about manufacturing
opinion than they are about gauging it.

Attempting to bring attention to
the manipulative nature of the “poll” I replied:

“No
such poll for "striking back" against Turkey’s illegal invasion of
Northern Syria, or Israel's massacre of unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza,
or the use of White Phosphorus (a chemical weapon) by the US in Raqqa or allied
forces in Mosul or Saudi's carpet bombing of Yemen.”

Neutral bystanders?

Also conveniently left out of
mainstream media discussion over “what to do about Syria” is that the United
Kingdom, France, Turkey, the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have all been inflaming the civil war, and keeping it going since it
broke out in 2011. These governments are not now, nor have they ever been,
neutral or innocent bystanders.

On the contrary, they have been
funnelling billions of dollars’ worth of conventional weapons, rocket launchers,
assault rifles, anti-tank missiles and the like. Britain is already neck deep
in this conflict, as are its “allies”, a point that award winning investigative
journalist Gareth Porter illustrates in frightening detail in his article “How America armed terrorists in Syria”. Porter describes a
declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency report that revealed:

“that the
[Saudi funded and CIA facilitated] shipment [into Syria] in late August 2012
had included 500 sniper rifles, 100 RPG (rocket propelled grenade launchers)
along with 300 RPG rounds and 400 howitzers. Each arms shipment encompassed as
many as ten shipping containers, it reported, each of which held about 48,000
pounds of cargo. That suggests a total payload of up to 250 tons of weapons per
shipment. Even if the CIA had organized only one shipment per month, the arms
shipments would have totalled 2,750 tons of arms bound ultimately for Syria
from October 2011 through August 2012. More likely it was a multiple of that
figure”

The same declassified report described the main
armed opposition backed by “the west” to be highly sectarian in nature and
seeking to create a “Salafist Principality” or “state”.

The criminality of these actions
and their destructive effect on the people of Syria is difficult to overstate.

Relearning
the lessons of the past

It seems every generation must be
perpetually (re)educated as to the extent to which truths, half-truths and outright
lies are repeated daily by their politicians, governments and media, particularly
in matters of war and peace.

Perhaps chemical weapons were
used in eastern Ghouta and perhaps not. Hersch and others have suggested that there is some evidence of discussions about “false flag” operations to justify incursions into Syria in the past. The timing now is noteworthy - President Trump has publicly stated that he wants to bring US troops “back
home” from Syria, and eastern Ghouta is falling into government
control, according to Reuters reports.

Or perhaps the Syrian government
did use chemical weapons simply to crush any last hope among the rebels.

Unfortunately the proposed
military strikes will have nothing to do with exposing the truth or holding
anyone accountable. They will be purely for show, by self-interested parties
that are themselves deeply implicated in crimes against humanity and war crimes
being committed in Syria. And as was outlined at the beginning of this article,
military strikes by Britain, France or the US into Syria would not only
continue to destabilise the country and risk direct confrontation with Russia
they would also be wholly illegal.

We cannot hold people to account
for committing alleged war crimes by committing further actual war crimes.

Unlike citizens in many other
parts of the world, those of us in self-proclaimed liberal democracies have the
ability – however limited – to assert pressure to curtail our governments’ use
of violence. I would go further and say we have the obligation to do so.

Write to your local paper, contact
your political representatives, and tell them you oppose any further
involvement in Syria, other than
providing humanitarian aid and support to civilian victims of the war in a
manner that is transparent and
verifiable.

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